Mai Ghoussoub

A tour de force in Arab literature and letters, Mai Ghoussoub, who has died at the age of 54, was a publisher, author and artist. The controversial titles she published for Saqi Books, the company she founded 28 years ago with her childhood friend André Gaspard, and her critical essays on aesthetics, sexism, censorship and war - as well as her striking art performances - embody a vibrancy often associated with her native Beirut, a city and intellectual scene now eclipsed by the increasing Islamisation of a fractured Middle East.

Ghoussoub was born into a Lebanon where, as she wrote, the doctor apologised to her Christian Arab father, a professional footballer, for delivering a girl to a family with no male heirs. She attended the secular French lycée in Beirut, with children of all religious persuasions. To please her parents she studied mathematics at the American University of Beirut, at the same time taking a degree in literature at the Lebanese University. She came of age during the anti-Vietnam war protests of the late 1960s - at a time when the Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum sang A'tini Bundaqiya (A rifle to liberate Arab land) and the writings of Germaine Greer and Simone de Beauvoir were widely available in Beirut bookstores.

Despite supporting the Palestinians in the early 1970s, Ghoussoub and a group of students were kidnapped in Beirut and brought before the PLO leader Yasser Arafat, then based in that city, for distributing a publication critical of his corruption. They were only released because one student had an important father. Rebellious and anti-establishment, Ghoussoub was a self-proclaimed feminist, who adored modern jazz and belly dancing.

During the 1975 Lebanese civil war, she and Gaspard helped to establish two medical dispensaries in quarters of Beirut from where the doctors had fled and where there were no pharmacies. They lived in a poor Muslim area on the west side of the notorious green line. Their humanitarian group negotiated the release of Christian hostages, but not all efforts were successful. When they demanded that George Habash's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hand over a kidnapped Phalange Christian militiaman, his body was dumped at the door of their dispensary.

In 1977 Ghoussoub was driving a wounded Palestinian to hospital when she was shot. She lost an eye and went for further medical treatment in the UK. She moved to Paris briefly before returning to London and starting Al-Saqi Books, the first Arabic bookshop in London, with Gaspard in 1979, an ill-timed venture. They had little money and the road to the airport in Beirut - the city where they needed to buy books - was closed. Eventually, they stocked their store in Westbourne Grove, which became a hub for Middle Easterners in London and for UK universities. By 1983, they were publishing their first titles, but by 1987 the book trade was faltering and they were forced to sell Saqi's literary imprint, Serpent's Tail, to Pete Ayrton.

Dynamic and compassionate, Ghoussoub was a courageous publisher. Her commitment to gender issues was reflected by Saqi's booklist - with a range of titles that few Arab publishers would dare to produce: for example, Brian Whitaker's examination of gay and lesbian Middle Eastern life, Unspeakable Love, and the novel Menstruation, about a fundamentalist who smelled women's periods, by the Syrian Ammar Abdulhamid.

In her own writing, Ghoussoub explored "the female enigma" whether by featuring Janis Joplin in her play Divas, for Jamil/Jamila, performed in Beirut, Paris, London and Newcastle, or analysing social sexual dynamics in her essay on Viagra chewing gum, an alleged plot by the Israelis to threaten Egyptian birthrates. Her memoir Leaving Beirut, published in 1997, revisits chastity, nationalism and the futility of revenge taught by a Jewish teacher at Ghoussoub's lycée, which laid the groundwork for Saqi's humanitarian open door policy to anyone - no matter their religious persuasion - threatened by violence and war.

Saqi parties were legendary. An Israeli journalist could be seen hugabug with an Arab editor and close friend of Arafat's, according to Index on Censorship's Jo Glanville, who edited Qissat, a Saqi anthology of Palestinian women's short stories. When Glanville reminded Ghoussoub that she came from a Jewish family and was perhaps not the best choice to edit a Palestinian collection, Ghoussoub disagreed - a rare stance in today's Arab world.

Ghoussoub, who studied sculpture at Morley College, London, and the Henry Moore studio in the 1980s, combined her loves of literature and art. Her sculptures and installations were exhibited internationally. In 2004, in a duo show with the Israeli artist, Anna Sherbany, part of the London Biennale at the Shoreditch gallery, she became one of the first Arab women artists to explore the veil in a public space by dressing up in an elaborate Islamic get-up and carrying a tennis racket around the art haunts of Shoreditch. To her delight, nobody took any notice, proving a pet theory that Britain is a tolerant country.

Last year's war between Hizbullah and Israel spurred her into action. The resulting books and readings in London, and the art exhibition, Lebanon - Image in All the People, curated by Ghoussob and Souheil Sleiman for the Liverpool Biennial, celebrated Beirut, the city she loved. As the Lebanese poet Abbas Beydoun writes, "Mai was very patriotic, but at the same time a woman of the world. She was the daughter of the moment, the first to present postmodernism in Arabic. She was herself without compromise, yet she always cared for everyone." Or as Ghoussoub metaphorically described herself only last month: "I live horizontally and I'm not ready to stand up."

She is survived by her husband, the journalist and writer Hazim Saghie, her parents Antoine and Maggie Ghoussoub and her sister Hoda.

Jo Glanville writes: Mai Ghoussoub was an original. A vivid personality with a charming, girlish quality and a raffish appearance, she had an immense influence on a wide group of people. The political conviction and courage she showed in her youth, during the bloody civil war in Lebanon, informed an independence of spirit and thought which cut through all the political rhetoric that plagues the Middle East.

She and Hazim were always the best people to talk to if you wanted to be brought back down to earth. Discussion of the latest Iraqi or Lebanese crisis would be punctuated with humour, jokes and irony - no matter how much despair there might also be. Nothing was too serious not to be deserving of mockery.

She was an intellectual and artist with a great sense of fun. She brought together an extraordinary array of people and many friendships were forged around her social hub. Although she was extremely well connected and greatly admired, I often felt that the Arab intellectual and artistic community she was at the heart of remained sadly neglected by the mainstream. Only when Saqi's warehouse in Beirut was bombed during the war last summer, did her company begin to get wider public acclaim.

She was one of those rare people whose death leaves a hole not just in the lives of family and close friends, but in that of a wider community. Her influence will remain, but her input is still needed: at a time of conflict, polarisation and very few laughs, her culture and humanity were evidence of just how much brilliance the Middle East can produce.

·Mai Ghoussoub, publisher, writer and artist, born November 2 1952; died February 17 2007